Someone asked me today about the CI stack we have at Simpleform. Then someone else asked about our logging. Then I got into a conversation with someone about Backbone. So here is nearly everything we use and build stuff with.

First I spend most of my time in Tornado. Right now we’re working on an API that sits in front of Mongo so we are using Tornado and Bitly’s asyncpymongo. As long as I’m listing libraries I’ll also mention we are using Mock for testing and Boto to interact with Amazon’s AWS.

We make extensive use of Amazon’s Web Services. That is EC2 servers, RDS, S3, Elastic IPs, CloudFront, whew… It’s scripted with custom scripts that fire up Puppet clients and servers that build out and configure the environment.

We also built a site for a client in Django this year and it went very well. I like Django. I’d use it more if it fit into the types of sites we build, but too often it feels forced so we go with Tornado.

Late last year I worked on a project that used CoffeeScript, Backbone, and Sass on the front-end. I had never used any of these tools and wasn’t particularly a strong JavaScript developer, so it was fun to see these tools from a different perspective. Since then I released Laterspam.org which used all three. I have another app I will release someday that also uses them.

I use Codekit to manage compilation, syntax checking, and minifying. If you’re on a Mac it’s a must have.